Is Wikio worth worrying about?
Dear readers,
My letter today concerns a blog ranking system called ‘Wikio’. As some readers may not be familiar with this ranking system, I thought I would give my two cents worth about whether or not it’s worth worrying about from a blogger’s perspective. I’m sure most people who follow political blogs have seen some of the biggest bloggers proudly display their ’statporn’ on their site, showing how many readers they get every month. Wikio, however, takes a very different approach to deciding who is top of the pile. Wikio explains its own ranking thus:
“The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles. Only links found in the RSS feed are included. Blogrolls are not taken into account, and the weight of any given link increases according to how recently it was published. We thus hope to provide a classification that is more representative of the current influence levels of the blogs therein. Moreover, the weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With our algorithm, the weight of a link from a top blog is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked.”
In short, Wikio look at how many times other bloggers link to you and also takes into account how high up their own rankings the blogs are that link to you. Once this is all done, the rankings are compiled (CLICK HERE for full list) and Wikio think that this gives a representative view of “the current influence levels of the blogs”. I disagree.
Personally, I think that using nothing more than incoming links to measure the ‘influence’ of a blog is misleading because there are several other important factors that must be taken into account if the ‘influence’ of a blog is to be estimated with any real accuracy:
READERSHIP – when measuring the ‘influence’ of a blog, the number of people that read it is surely a key indicator. According to Wikio, Tory Bear (number 11 in Wikio’s list) is more influential than ConservativeHome (15), which – with the greatest of respect to Tory Bear – doesn’t seem that likely in terms of reader numbers. That’s not to say Tory Bear hasn’t broken a few decent-sized stories in the blogosphere, rather that ConservativeHome should surely be near the top of any ‘influence’ list.
WHO READS IT - In terms of influence, it’s not just a matter of how many people read a blog, there is also the question of who reads the blog. For example, ConHome gets MPs writing on the site and I daresay gets a lot of MPs reading it too. Compare this with Labourlist (4th), who rarely get anyone significant in Westminster to write for them.
BLOGGING BY PARTY - Another issue that may distort the Wikio rankings to some extent is the relative strength of blogging within the major parties. For example, Charlotte Gore (21) and Mark Reckons (17) are both relatively new blogs and have done extremely well to be heavily linked to within months of starting up. Having said that, in my humble opinion there isn’t much competition for good Lib Dems writers, which might lead to them getting more links than they might otherwise have expected.
QUALITY OF WRITING – Heresy Corner (73) and People’s Republic of Mortimer (59) were recently nominated for the Orwell Prize for blogging, yet find themselves languishing quite a long way down the Wikio rankings. Does the quality of writing make a blog influential? To an extent I think it can help, although writing quality is in itself not sufficient. In all fairness Alix Mortimer writes for other sites as well so she isn’t able to blog that often for PROM, although Heresy Corner posts on a regular basis.
GROUP BLOGGING – Liberal Conspiracy (3), Labourlist (4) and Lib Dem Voice (5) are all fairly big players in the blogosphere, but is it relevant that they are group blogs rather than individual blogs? Needless to say they can cover more material given the number of writers that each site has and I’m sure their readership is quite large. Then again, each individual writer has considerably less influence than the site as a whole.
FREQUENCY OF POSTING - Iain Dale (1), Old Holborn (9) and Dizzy (6) can post several times a day with ease, while other bloggers cannot compete with this. Does a high frequency of posting make them more influential? Perhaps. If two bloggers were both of the same quality but one posted more often, the total number of links that the more frequent poster would receive will surely be higher, even though their blog is not necessarily any better than the other. Obviously, Iain, OH and Dizzy back up their frequency of posting with good content, otherwise their reader numbers would have stalled a long time ago, but more frequent bloggers lower down the rankings could theoretically appear more influential than they really are using Wikio’s algorithm.
IMPACT - If we are talking about real influence, the very fact that Guido (2) has already claimed at least two political scalps surely puts him at the top of the list for years to come. Not only does he have a huge readership, he is literally capable of changing the course of political debate. On the other hand, Political Betting (7) has a huge amount of influence over real people placing real bets with real money, so shouldn’t this put them at the top of the list too?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Wikio strikes me as a rather crude way of measuring ‘influence’. In any case, the use of the word ‘influence’ is not particularly helpful because it doesn’t specify who you are supposed to be influencing – does having influence among online wannabe politicos really matter as much as having influence over Shadow Cabinet members? If Gordon Brown or David Cameron read your blog, wouldn’t that mean it has more influence than having 10,000 university student readers? Personally, I think a raw link count is too unwieldy and on this basis I propose a new system for Wikio that would measure real influence in the political blogosphere. To be honest, I think you need two entirely separate systems for measuring influence, depending on what you mean by ‘influence’:
1.Influence over the public – to measure this, I think you need a combination of unique visitor numberes, the number of incoming links and some form of voting system for readers to express their preferences. By taking all three of these factors into account, you would get a genuine impression of who has most influence over the political landscape in this country.
2. Influence over the blogosphere - to gauge this, I would like to propose a brand new ‘Blogger’s Blogger’ prize. Rather than having the Total Politics ranking that invite anyone to vote, I would like to have a new prize awarded annually to the blogger that other bloggers vote to be the best. That way, the blogger who has most influence within the blogosphere (which I believe is very separate from the issue of who influences the public) could be easily identified.
Phew. What a rant.
Witanagemot Blogs
Thanks for the link. That’ll help with my Wikio ranking this month
Seriously though you make some good points. I don’t think anybody (least of all myself) thinks that Wikio is the be all and end all of ranking for blogs. I think that traffic to a blog is a very important measure as you say and whilst it would be very difficult to measure, the influence of the people reading the blog is of course relevant.
There seem to be several different ways of ranking blogs at the moment:
- Wikio
- Technorati which places more emphasis on the breadth of sites linking to you for their “Authority” measurement
- Statporn – this relies on the blog keeping track of the stats using some sort of Analytics type tool and then publishing them regularly – not all blogs do, it’s up to them.
- Voting – Total Politics poll seems to have established itself as the standard for this.
- Individual party – I don’t know about the other parties but the Lib Dems have had a “Blogger of the Year awards” for the past 4 years running.
I think it would be very difficult to get a definitive way of measuring influence. Your first suggestion would doubtless get bogged down in arguments about what proportion go to each category and how exactly they are measured. I like your idea of a “Bloggers’ Blogger” type vote though.
“I would like to propose a brand new ‘Blogger’s Blogger’ prize. Rather than having the Total Politics ranking that invite anyone to vote, I would like to have a new prize awarded annually to the blogger that other bloggers vote to be the best.”
Isn’t that rather similar to Iain Dale’s ‘Total Politics’ award, currently running on his blog?
Well, apart from the lack of a prize…
Julia, anyone can vote in the Total Politics thing but the Bloggers Blogger prize would only allow fellow political bloggers to vote, not readers.
Mark, I do appreciate the irony of linking to other blogs in a post about Wikio! Technorati also seems very clumsy to me.
My opinion on the Wikio ranking has always been that it is essentially an excellent piece of marketing for the Wikio blog aggregation site. Very few people hear about Wikio on their own, but they do see bloggers talking about Wikio.
When you get an email from Wikio saying you’re one of the top 500 bloggers, you’re bound to feel happy, validated and impressed. Your first impression is always an excellent one. Then you’ll run off to your blog and tell all your readers about this excellent website you’ve found that carries a list of the best blogs – that you’re on!
And so the cycle continues. It’s really very clever
Anyway, I absolutely agree with your idea – and I’d be willing to go a bit further and help create a “Blogger’s Blogger” voting system. Could be quite a bit of fun
UPDATE …It would also give us a fine opportunity and excuse to have an award ceremony and a party and invite the whole blogosphere along. Let’s get frikkin organised!
You’re right that it measures influence on the blogosphere, not influence on the public – so fact is I appear higher on rankings than sites with twice as many readers, and lower than someone with half the number of readers.
It probably has a use for people new to the blogosphere and for old hands wanting to check the ‘pulse’ of what people are mostly talking about – the Top 100 is actually a pretty good place to start.
Wikio might not generate any traffic but the links it’s counting do, and so in this regard it’s a very good thing for Wikio to be measuring – it’s measuring something we want to see more of.
Stu, it does seem to have got some traction but I must admit that I pay less attention to it than I used to. And an award ceremony wouldn’t be much good for anonymous bloggers like me….
Charlotte, links do indeed generate traffic but then why not just use unique visitors to measure the ‘influence’ of blogs?
It’s all nonsense. Even hit counters are nonsense because you can manipulate them to suit your own end.
My first months ranking on Wikio was 422 (I think), the second month my readership doubled and my Wikio ranking fell to 500+.
If you have a talent with video or pictures, fellow bloggers will steal them for their own site and give a hat tip to the original sites, thus a better Wikio ranking next month.
Just take a leaf out of Old Hoborn’s book and wear a V for Vendetta mask or something… Or go dressed as a comically oversized post box!
(Off topic) Re your Republican Sickos letter last week. I pointed out at the time that the Obama/Hitler image you used belonged not to Republicans but to pro-single payer followers of Lyndon LaRouche. It now turns out that the Obama/Joker poster was created by a liberal-leaning Dennis Kucinich supporter of Palestinian descent.
Rab, fair point, videos and pictures can indeed make a difference, hence why Wikio rankings can fluctuate quite a lot month on month.
Stu, thanks, will keep that in mind, although I’ve never seen anywhere that sells a blue postbox outfit.
DB, seriously off topic….
LFAT,
Probably because it’s impossible to accurately measure every blog’s visitor count – would you be willing to embed a traffic monitoring pixel?
Links are, I suppose, an indirect indicator of traffic – not a very good one, mind – but people suddenly moving up in wikio rankings suggests there’s a bit of buzz about them – and considering it’s fairly easy to predict which blogs will jump and which ones are going to fall, Wikio is indicating *something* useful, but I guess I’m not entirely sure what
I’m not listed on Wikio, so it’s irrelevant to me. I don’t write to influence particularly, although if my witterings make people stop and think a little about civil liberties, then I’m happy enough. For the most part, I write for me – to get things off my chest. As for all the pets win prizes stuff – I can’t be arsed, frankly.
Dear LFAT, I think Stu is on to something. Just suppose that wikio, by playing on the egos of bloggers, gets itself established as an industry standard. Advertisers then start using wikio as a place to direct ads to bloggers. Is this a viable scenario, and what effects would that have on the blogosphere?
Isn’t that influence (over the blogosphere)though? I started blogging because of The Red Rag affair, which I became aware of through Guido. Mt first post was a repost of a GOT pic ‘compare the smear twats’ so I would say both were a big influence. EH when half a dozen blogs reposted DnC’s video a couple of days ago was DnC not exerting influence. I think he was. People also get reposted for talen with word not just pics, Take Iain Dale’s daley dozen for example. These backlinks have a much higher ranking on Wikio because he is No 1.
On Balance I think it is a reasonable metric, of one angle but it is just that, no mor or less.
The TP poll is wide open to abuse, anyone could engineer a position with a few gmail or yahoo accounts. I saw one blog in the top 20 of one list that is 300+ in Wikio.
My blog was in the Wkio Politics top 100 a few months back but despite links from BBC Today and Newsnight pages over the last few months I have dropped to the 140’s. If this drop continues I may stop putting the Wikio ratings on my blog! I started my blog to give me a place to sound off and so reduce my stress levels; however a bit of validation is nice. I was in Iain Dale’s top 100 in 2007, dropped but stayed in there in 2008 and am nervously awaiting my 2009 position. Why does it matter? Am I that insecure?
@Ollie Cromwell – Indeed Ollie, of course they are infuencing the blogosphere. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying! It’s a tough one to get a standard measure on.
And I wonder what blog it is that’s 300+ on Wikio and in a TP top 20!!
And I’ve only got two e mail accounts, one for real life me and one for blogging me, I’m not in the Labour Party so I don’t fiddle votes…. ;o)
Stu, I never got an email from Wikio! I tend to rely on other bloggers to tell me where I am, if anywhere.
I’m quite happy with my readership and the fact that good debates continue in my comments.
Why is it always male bloggers who want accolades? Is it something to do with ego-boosting?
I see you don’t read me LfaT but I’ll still keep you on my blogroll.
Subrosa, I have actually come across your blog quite a few times but my blogroll is seriously out of date. And maybe some men do need to upszie their ego – compensation for a lack of size elsewhere?….
Charlotte, Wikio is indeed good at capturing ‘buzz’, but that’s very different from ‘influence’. Perhaps they just need to reword their website!
Longrider, fair enough, you’re not the only one.
GOH, I wouldn’t rule it out but I haven’t seen much advertising from them at all.
Ollie, it is open to abuse which is frustrating but inevitable with any email-based poll.
NAS, the problem is that links have to be within RSS feeds, otherwise they don’t count. For example, I get regular links from ConHome to my blog but it doesn’t count on Wikio because ConHome puts the link in their sidebar. Not that I’m bitter, you understand….
It’s a bit like being back at school, isn’t it? The “popular” kids are the ones everyone wants to be friends with and cliqueishness rules. You’re undoubtedly right about the Lib Dems giving each other leg-ups. On the other hand, the likes of Charlotte G and Mr Quist are so brilliant (and, most of the time, right) that they deserve their prominence, however bogus the Wikio system undoubtedly is.
Mark R got there first – but yes, a link from the Epistolary Conservative is always highly valued. I don’t have the time to do regular roundups, and don’t link to other people nearly so often as I perhaps should, so languishing on Wikio is probably a just reward. Dale has studiously ignored me for ever – until, strangely enough, yesterday; I wasted good nights’ sleep worrying about what I might have done to upset him. I imagine the lack of links from his mighty bloggernaut has some bearing on Heresy Corner’s lowly ranking in Wikio, which I agonise about for about four minutes every month. But now I’ve switched to worrying about how many people are following me on Twitter. It’s all bollocks, really.
The notion of influence on the blogosphere is an artificial one, largely because, Guido apart (and perhaps Conservative Home, Dale and maybe CIF, which doesn’t seem to count) the British blogging community is tiny and onanistic. Just occasionally I’ve put some small item into the public domain, but most of the time even a big “hit” in terms of page views is fairly meaningless. I got several thousand the other day on account of an Obama joke – but other things I’m really proud of get ignored.
The other thing I’ve never really understood is Feedburner. Yesterday I had 340 “readers”; today it’s 490. How come?
Excellent analysis, by the way.
I assure you, subrosa, I do not spend my time wondering how best to have my ego stroked by Wikio
I am similarly happy, ranked on a list or not! (and I think a fair few female bloggers are just as interested in accolades as the men – but there’s fewer female bloggers in general for some reason).
One very positive thing about Wikio is that it does encourage a culture of bloggers linking to each other. For various reasons I really like it when people properly link to each other and give credit for well-written posts – Wikio helps encourage that with some degree of reward. Also, an incoming link from LFaT means a lot more to me than 200 places on a list.
One negative thing is that it encourages everyone to imagine that somehow we’re all competing with each other, or even that we’re in the same market as each other. Which. We’re. Not.
P.S. Heresiarch I’m not entirely certain that Feedburner really understand Feedburner. They’re trying to do something that is essentially impossible. All credit for trying, but your mileage may vary!
Heresiarch, Feedburners simply estimates how many people read your feed. Because there are so many programmes available for RSS, they just look at how many ‘hits’ your feed gets and make an estimate based on that – hence why it bounces up and down, depending on whether people click on a post or not.
Stu, the competition element is really ramped up by statporn from the likes of Guido which never fails to drive me towards a stiff drink when I see his visitor numbers. I agree about the culture of linking, which is why I started doing daily roundups because my style of blogging was absolutely useless for linking to anyone else.
Yep I’ll second that.
@NotaSheep –
Man is a competitive animal – it’s all that testosterone. You are normal. You just need to ensure that you kow the rules of the game. don’t forget, there has been an explosion in bloggers over the past 3 years. If you need reassurance, find out the increase in the no. of bloggers year-on-year and work out your position in % terms. For what it’s worth, I like your postings.
@Rab C. Nesbitt –
Rab I will email you the one I spotted but I am sure there are more. I suspect the votes cast were quite low so it does not mean anyone fiddled, it could just be that they lobbied well encouraging their readers to vote. I was just pointing out that it is also flawed.
You would have to be pretty keen to come up with a list of 10 to vote for. I didn’t vote, too hard by far, I could name my top 3 but beyond that the ones I follow are as intersting as each other.
I think TP approach is more flawed than Wikio. I like the idea of a bloggers vote on a one blogger one vote no self vote basis.
One other area of influence that A Tory hasn’t discussed is influence on the consumer, this is an easy one and can be measured by advertising revenue. I made 17 cents last week! A new record.
Traffic – unique page views – talks, everything else is just bullsh*t and, in my view, walks. Except paid-for click throughs to advertising. That’s king. Clearly. Revenue rocks, if you can get it!
Seriously stats are bollocks. What matters? The raw number of eyeballs (unique visitors) on your site? Or is it the number of pages that view (pageviews)?
Or is it the kind of people reading your site, notable by links from their sites (bloggers – the wikio metric)? Or is it print journalist bloggers? Or some other arbitrary elite?
Better yet, should it be me? Shall I and I alone decide what blogs are cool and which are fools? I think it should be but I’m only deciding for me and you lot can make up your own minds.
Or you can go with one of the above methods!
Navel gazing. It kills the time on a hot summers day, doesn’t it?
This is no better than Technorati and all the others. It’s rubbish and I never bother with these systems.
[...] 1. Party Lines on Andy Burnham’s NHS naivety.2. Subrosa asks where our Afgahnistan aid money goes.3. Tory Rascal wants to bugger a burglar. At least, I think that’s what he said.4. Andrea Leadsom thinks banking bonuses can be a good thing.5. John Rentoul berates Gordon Brown for leaving Tom Harris languishing on the backbenches.6. John Redwood promises to be funny.7. Tim Montgomerie’s seven defences of political blogging.8. Stephen Glenn on LibDem target seats (and he calls fellow LibDem blogger Irfan Ahmed stupid…)9. It is safe to say Donal Blaney is not a fan of Ted Kennedy.10. Alex Massie on Mandelson and the Lockerbie bomber.11. SNP Tactical Voting has a go at Wikio for their blog rankings.12. As does Letters from a Tory. [...]
@grumpy old man – The readers of PB wonder where you have been…
Oh and page views/visitors is the killer stat for me – if you have more regular readers there must be something that you’re doing right.
Getting a few links from blog giants like Drudge or Guido/Dale doesn’t make your average content magically more sticky.
I take all rankings of blogs with a tablespoon of salt, and this is a well-written critique of one of the best, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
This is what I care about when I’m writing a piece (and thus what I think should be used to ‘judge’ a blogpost, and a blog), in order:
1. Critical reaction in the comments – a good audience is the best aid to writing, and the more critical they are (positive and condemnatory) the better. Not everyone who reads a blog necessarily likes it – if your blog is *loved* by its readers, that is more important than having lots of them.
2. Does it generate discussion/debate? – not just number of comments, but quality of discussion: not entirely linked to the lead article, of course, but you know when you’ve not included enough meat. You can’t hold a blogger responsible for the comments, but you can judge the blog by them (as in – you can’t blame a landlord personally for the quality of his punters, but you would judge a bar by their presence)
3. Influence on influential readers – The key is influence, and that means is it being repeated and cited by other opinion formers, or can you see the impact in the political world?
4. Number of people reading – no point being brilliant if no-one noticies
Links are a fickle animal, and don’t mean that much in the abstract. Only qualitative measures really count, unless (as someone wisely said above) you’re making money.
I like your idea for a Bloggers’ Blogger Award – though I suspect there would again be several categories.
@Plato – Dear Plato. I’m overwhelmed with entirely hypocritical humility that I have been missed by such august company. I have posted a couple of times in the past week, but, like yourself, being in such demand I must, perforce, spread myself thinly.
[...] From a Tory dares question the mighty Wikio… and has a [...]
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Hear Hear!
I believe that’s the first time I’ve agreed with every paragraph of one of your letters, and I enjoyed it very much.
Even if I was number 1026 on Wikio and 278th on Total Politics, it wouldn’t change a thing.
I don’t blog for money, so ratings don’t matter. I do it for MY fun.
(Tips for those who want to “up” their ratings available at OH)
In answer to your question – yes. But any search for a single standard is doomed. If we are assessing rabbits some people want the largest, some the prettiest, some to make the best gloves, and some to make the best rabbit stew.
Blogs are like rabbits – all different. And blog readers are like rabbit fanciers – all interested in different things.
So, the more different views and assessments the better, as long as we know what they highlight so can quote what they mean accurately.
Ditto stats and pageviews, but agree that anyone who takes any of this too seriously is missing a point. There are more important games to play.
I’d suggest that the best points about Wikio are that it has a decent level of diversity in the lists, has a site with a UK focus (unlike Technorati) and talks to people (unlike Technorati unless you are very prominent).
Personally, I’d like to see the wikio chicklet count traffic, too.
I guess I’d say that Wikio’s niche is “measuring the conversation generated by recent articles with other commentators”, with a nod to the same factor over the last 12 months.
I love that they prioritise independent sites, and that the rankings are sufficiently permeable that new people can get a look in for a couple of months relatively easily, or that that can happen to a whole subject niche if there is a movement to register at the same time.
As with the ID rankings I find much interest between say 75 and 250.
Wikio is only part of the answer – my favorite is blog grader which combines Amazon’s Alexa traffic ranking, Wikio’s system of link rating and the Google indexing count, together with content and social media analysis for an overall scoring system out of 100.
As a matter of interest here’s a quick rundown:
Guido scores 93 and Dale scores 92,
while of the other commenters here:
Wardman Wire scores 85,
LFaT 78,
Nourishing Obscurity 77,
Heresy Corner 75,
Mark Reckons 73,
Political Betting 65,
Subrosa 62,
Charlotte Gore 60,
Plato Says & Not A Sheep 50,
Rantin’ Rab & Stu Shape 48,
The Red Rag 45,
I get a measly 33
and John Q Publican gets 22/100.
I think such a composite tool is far more accurate and the analysis provides some excellent advice on how to increase the effectiveness of your blog.
Interesting site, thanks!